Science, Nature, and Hatred: ‘Finding Out’ at the Malting House Garden School, 1924–29
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In reconfigurations of the ‘nature’ of the English child and childhood in the early 20th century a key role was played by the Malting House Garden School in Cambridge, England, founded by the unorthodox trader and inventor Geoffrey Pyke and codirected by pioneer educator and psychoanalyst Susan Isaacs. Known scurrilously in the town of Cambridge as ‘a pregenital brothel’, the Malting House School was supported by ecologist A G Tansley and psychologist Jean Piaget amongst others for its ‘copious and careful record of phenomena’. Though short lived, the Malting House School experiment became widely known through popular and influential books, written by Isaacs on early childhood development and education, based largely on data collected at the school. Less is known concerning Pyke's applications of psychoanalytic knowledge, his powerful scientific networks, and his grand vision for a new form of education. With recently recovered records and other archival documents, I seek to contribute to a historical geography of localized psychoanalytic knowledge by exploring the tangle of disciplinary relations in the mutual and imaginative constitution of two pillars of the Malting House School: natural science and psychoanalysis. In particular, I examine what Isaacs referred to as ‘the ecological point of view’ as well as the place of hatred in relation to the nursery school's attempted manufacture of infant scientists eager to ‘find out’. For Pyke, the main threat to the “vigorous survival of an intelligent bourgeoisie” was the Oedipus situation, as described by Sigmund Freud. Through new educational techniques that recognized powerful emotion between generations, Pyke sought to help mould a race that would be able to survive the great changes which he expected science to create in our environment.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".